Nanaboozhoo Died for Your Sins

Matthew L.M. Fletcher* April, 2025

Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. By Vine Deloria, Jr. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1969. Pp. 279. $5.95.

For Floyd Westerman, whom we met that one time in Albuquerque and whose album hung from the wall at Victor Kishigo’s old place.

Bezhig

Two decades after Vine Deloria Jr.’s death,¹ Nanaboozhoo² read Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (“Custer”) and decided to attend law school at the University of Michigan. Hey, why not? Vine Deloria was a law student when he published Custer.³ That book was probably the most widely read, most influential book about Indians, by an Indian, ever. Custer came at a time when the United States was, tribe-by-tribe, passive-aggressively moving away from terminating the tribal-federal relationship and toward tribal self-determination (pp. 54–77). But the colonizer wasn’t quite ready to jump into the deep end of the self-determination pool when Deloria was writing.⁴ No doubt Custer started a national conversation (among political elites anyway) about Indian affairs, putting Indians and tribes in a sympathetic, humorous, and pragmatic light.⁵ Nanaboozhoo wanted to learn how tribal self-determination had succeeded or failed and figured law school was the way to go.

In law school, Nanaboozhoo discovered quickly that American law relies on vast, interlocking mythologies: how the opinion pieces of semi-anonymous, myth-making “Framers” form the corpus of the federal Constitution’s “original public meaning”;⁶ how the theory of the “consent of the governed” serves as the source of governmental power;⁷ and how the tragic but inevitably “vanishing Indian”⁸ marked the path for Manifest Destiny. These legal fictions reminded them of Christopher Columbus,⁹ a myth—like “the Fountain of Youth [and] the Seven Cities of Gold” (p. 5)—followed by more myths invented by the colonizers. These fictions elevated myths over realities, power over justice.

Nanaboozhoo’s law school lessons often were so horrible that they wondered why Vine himself decided to attend law school. Nanaboozhoo learned about how the colonizer “negated the rights of the Indian tribes to sovereignty and equality among the nations of the world. It took away their title to their land and gave them the right only to sell. And they had to sell it to the European nation that had discovered their land” (p. 30). The colonizer legally established Indian people as subhuman—children under the law—incapable of growing, reading, learning, of becoming civilized. It wasn’t just Indians that the colonizer dehumanized on racial grounds; the Framers did it to enslaved persons, too.¹⁰ But when the colonizer extended (on paper) individual rights to formerly enslaved persons through the Fourteenth Amendment, none of those rights came to Indians until decades later: “Indians were America’s captive people without any defined rights whatsoever” (p. 8). But the colonizer certainly did not ignore Indians; government officials, in accordance with laws and informal rules, “kidnapped and forced [Indian children] into boarding schools thousands of miles from their homes to learn the white man’s ways” (p. 8). The colonizer flooded Indian reservations in the name of progress (p. 29). Though Indian people had much better ideas than these, the colonizer usually would not listen to these ideas. Indeed, the colonizer recognized well-nigh absolute power over Indian people, tribal nations, and their property (p. 37). The only authority over Indians was the United States. In Vine’s time, the only experts on Indians were federal officials (and the anthropologists the government replied upon as advisors) (pp. 96–97).

Nanaboozhoo could have despaired and given up, like so many Indigenous people had done. But law and power are bound together. Giving up on the law meant giving up to the powerful. Nanaboozhoo thought about their elders’ teachings, specifically the one about why cats always land on their feet.¹¹ Nanaboozhoo remembered how a cat had jumped from high in a tree to startle a poisonous snake, saving Nanaboozhoo’s life long ago. Nanaboozhoo rewarded the cat’s bravery by giving all cats the ability to always land on their feet when they fall or jump. Nanaboozhoo learned how power gives way to careful, strategic thought. It was then that Nanaboozhoo thought they understood why Vine Deloria had gone to law school.

Niizh

One year, Nanaboozhoo took a job as in-house counsel for a tribal nation in lower Michigan called the Shenanagona Anishinaabe Nation. Nanaboozhoo earned a license to practice law by passing the Michigan state bar exam but still needed to take a course on Shenanagona tribal law before they could practice in the tribal jurisdiction.

Nanaboozhoo and a half-dozen others showed up at the tribal court building. The tribal court building was the first tribal structure built with federal money, way back in the mid-1980s. The court room was old school, repurposed in the 2000s when the tribe opened up the Head Start down the road. Nanaboozhoo was glad to see paintings on the wall around the room depicting the Seven Sacred Teachings of the Anishinaabek.¹²

The instructors were the tribal attorney and the chief judge. They delivered an impressive PowerPoint presentation on the legal structure of the modern tribal government. The Shenanagona government was organized into two largely separate branches, the tribal council and the tribal economic development corporation.¹³ There was obviously a tribal court, too, but with relatively little involvement in the main flow of tribal governance. Vine might have been impressed with the corporate structure of both tribal government and tribal business:

Conforming their absolute freedom to fit rigid European political forms has been very difficult for most tribes, but on the whole they have managed extremely well. Under the Indian Reorganization Act Indian people have generally created a modern version of the old tribal political structure and yet have been able to develop comprehensive reservation programs which compare favorably with governmental structures anywhere.¹⁴

Tribal constitutions established a tribal legislative and executive branch, usually but not always combined into one entity, called the tribal council.¹⁵ Despite their archaic nomenclature that reminded Nanaboozhoo of TV shows where nonconformists get voted off an island, tribal councils were more like corporate boards of directors. Though elected by the tribal citizenry, council members almost exclusively worked as a body, through motion, ordinance, or resolution.¹⁶ Some tribal councils were hands-off, providing important big-picture advice and leadership on major governmental issues, while others engaged in what their employees might call micromanaging. Tribal leaders justified either one of these paradigms of tribal leadership by reference to tribal culture and traditions. Some tribal elected officials followed the tradition of their elders that negotiated treaties with their colonizers and others did what they could to improve their reelection chances, just like the colonizers’ politicians.

Tribal business boards were the same; often, the same people on the government tribal council served as members of the tribe’s Section 17 corporation board.¹⁷ Separating governmental and business arms allowed tribes to protect critical governmental assets from the risks associated with business activities, though that separation of assets usually limited a tribe’s ability to capitalize their economic ventures. Nanaboozhoo wondered if Vine predicted the benefits of separating tribal politics from tribal business decisions, much like the Harvard Project did decades later.¹⁸ To be sure, they imagined Vine would have predicted the negative consequences as well, given that theft from tribal organizations does exist.¹⁹ Those snake oil salesmen-types trawling Indian country in the 1960s are still around today.²⁰

Nanaboozhoo’s clients were disturbed by the ongoing crisis on the reservation of often unpunished non-Indian violence against tribal member women and children. When reading Custer, Nanaboozhoo was struck by Vine’s knowledge that the Supreme Court would ultimately hold tribal nations did not possess the power to prosecute non-Indian lawbreakers on tribal lands: “Early treaties allowed the tribes to punish white men violating their laws and borders, but since any attempt by the tribes to exercise this right was used as an incident to provoke war, that right was soon taken away ‘for the Indians’ own protection’ ” (p. 34). Indeed, the Supreme Court took that power away in 1978, a decade after Custer ’s publication.²¹ Nanaboozhoo noted the passive voice at the passage’s conclusion; Who did Vine think took that power away for the tribes’ own protection? According to precedent, tribal powers remained extant absent a clear expression of congressional intent to abrogate or modify them.²² In Nanaboozhoo’s understanding, there was never an act of Congress stripping tribes of this power. Nanaboozhoo also knew from their Indian law class that the Supreme Court could not “find” such an act, instead articulating an “unspoken assumption” by all three federal branches of government—and by tribal nations, somehow—that tribes never possessed this power at all.²³

Nanaboozhoo’s clients were also concerned about state and federal taxation of tribal citizens. On occasion, tribal members or tribal elected officials would come to Nanaboozhoo, pointing to the Indians Not Taxed Clause of the Federal Constitution,²⁴ insisting that it meant Indians could not be taxed without their express consent. Nanaboozhoo remembered Vine raising a similar question in Custer:

[T]here is a real question about the right of the United States to tax Indians at all. Taxing authority and power are a function of the exercise of sovereignty. The United States never had original sovereignty over the Indian people, merely a right to extinguish the Indian title to land. Where, argue Indian people when questioned, did sovereignty come from? (p. 38)

Nanaboozhoo knew the answer was that tribal nations entering into a government-to-government relationship with the United States agreed to come under the “protection” of the federal government.²⁵ That “protection” impliedly granted the federal government plenary powers over Indian affairs,²⁶ presumably including the power to impose taxes on Indians. Nanaboozhoo also knew that plenary power was a bad trickster story.²⁷ Poor Nanaboozhoo—like (most) every other tribal lawyer, they had to tell their clients to pay taxes and, consequently, suffer the wrath of community members who didn’t appreciate their advice. They wondered if Vine would have done the same thing had he worked in-house for a tribal government.

Niswi

One year, Nanaboozhoo became a fed, working in the Office of the Solicitor in the Department of the Interior. It was not lost on Nanaboozhoo that they were going to work for the colonizer. The solicitor’s office advised the Interior Department on Indian affairs matters. Historically, federal officials used that advice to force their policy preferences on Indian people and tribal nations: “From Plymouth Rock to the lava beds of northern California, the white man divided and conquered as easily as if he were slicing bread” (p. 204). But in recent decades, more and more Indigenous people joined the Interior Department hoping to do good for Indians and tribes. Nanaboozhoo’s boss was Ojibwe²⁸ and that boss’s boss was a citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna.²⁹ “Wonder what snide comment Vine would make about that factoid,” Nanaboozhoo thought, smirking. Nanaboozhoo knew in great detail all about Vine’s criticisms of the government. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was common for federal officials to threaten a tribe with termination whenever the tribal leadership took action that deviated from the federal government’s preferences (pp. 98, 135). Now that high-level federal Indian affairs officials were Indigenous, one hoped that those times were over.

The modern federal-tribal relationship is usually described through the metaphor of a trusteeship, with the United States as trustee and tribal nations as the trust beneficiary. Vine condemned the federal government’s trusteeship of Indian and tribal resources, cynically alleging that the government used the trust relationship to control Indians: “It turned out that the United States acquired the land neither by purchase nor by conquest, but by a more sophisticated technique known as trusteeship” (p. 31). In Vine’s time, that was probably the case, but Congress now routinely acknowledges an enforceable trust duty toward Indians and tribes.³⁰

Nanaboozhoo’s time at the solicitor’s office pained them, not because of the work, but, because it was a humorless, cold job. They spent a lot of time reviewing trust land acquisition applications. It was a strange thing, tribes buying back some of the land they lost to the colonizer and others, then turning around and giving it right back to the colonizer.³¹ It made a kind of surreal sense, though, since federally owned land cannot be lost to coerced sales, abandonment, or illegal taxes.³² Nanaboozhoo’s work often was thankless, bureaucratic, and boring. If there was even a hint that the trust land acquisition checklist wasn’t completed to perfection, they had to send it back to the tribe.³³ If the tribe wanted to use the land for gaming purposes, the scope of the review dramatically intensified.³⁴ Years would go by with no action on a trust land application. Nanaboozhoo imagined that Vine would have been impressed by twenty-first century tribal nations’ ability to purchase lands but would have chuckled wryly at the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that the feds erected to slow tribes down.

Nanaboozhoo also recalled that Custer described how federal officials focused on larger reservations with substantial resources and competent leadership, mostly ignoring smaller tribal nations with few resources (p. 258). Some things had changed from those days, but not much. The Interior Department, always internally conflicted between the conservation and exploitation of natural resources, favored tribal nations with substantial natural resource holdings—also known as “energy tribes”—and tribal nations with successful gaming operations and large cash resources. Tribal nations without wealth fared about as well as they did when Custer was published—that is to say, not well.

Nanaboozhoo’s least favorite type of work—the work that forced them into leaving Interior—involved intractable tribal governance disputes.³⁵ These disputes usually arose in the heat of a difficult political decision, often involving tribal citizenship or political banishment matters, leading to fights over tribal leadership. One feature of the self-determination era was that federal policy no longer favored interference in tribal internal governance.³⁶ A tribal leader or group of leaders ostensibly voted out of office could simply refuse to leave, often on the ethically questionable advice of counsel. They retained all the powers of government, including the power of the purse. Their political adversaries could sue them in tribal court (if there was one) or seek federal review. Even if the tribal court or a federal official opined that the holdover leaders were acting illegally, they could still simply refuse to leave office. Nothing short of physical force would be effective, and that was illegal, too. When these disputes reached their desk, Nanaboozhoo was shocked not at the salience of the Indian people, but at the way they fought—too often disregarding their own culture and traditions in favor of demanding political power from their political opponents, who were often their relatives. It broke Nanaboozhoo’s heart to see the political and legal structures imposed on Indian people by the colonizer causing this much harm.

Nanaboozhoo remembered Vine’s critique of how the federal government turned Indians on each other, all to control them better (p. 204–05). They knew that the United States often had quite easily manipulated Anishinaabe treaty negotiators with gifts, landed estates, cash, power, and even liquor.³⁷ The federal government in the self-determination era was not so manipulative but could or would do little to undo the damage these historical evils caused.

Even where intractable political disputes had not occurred, Nanaboozhoo could see that, for many tribes, such disputes were inevitable. These were all very preventable, predictable conflicts. The plain and obvious solution was to formally introduce aspects of traditional tribal leadership back into tribal governance. But they were saddened to see too many tribal leaders seeking elected office for the wrong reason and, once there, fighting to preserve those same avenues to power. They were self-colonizing.

Niiwin

One year, Nanaboozhoo ran for tribal council of the Shenanagona Nation. They knew they were likely to win election. All the Anishinaabeg knew the trickster god. Other than the ones they viciously tricked (and they had been doing less and less of that over time), the people liked Nanaboozhoo a great deal. They were a celebrity who knew culture and ceremonies, the land, and the community. They had the best interests of the tribe at heart, which wasn’t always the case back in the day when Nanaboozhoo had painful lessons to impart. They had, after all, been teaching the Anishinaabeg since time immemorial. But they were also a former tribal lawyer and a recovering federal official, so they knew a little bit about modern tribal governance. They won easily. Not unanimously (those aunties, man, jeez), but easily.

Nanaboozhoo’s prior experience with elections was not good. The traditional Anishinaabe would never recognize a leader simply because slightly more than half the adults had voted for them. An Anishinaabe ogemaa had to earn that power.³⁸ Leadership existed only when a tribe needed that particular leader and the specialized skills that leader possessed, such as when a conflict arose with another nation or within the community. It was foreign to Anishinaabe culture and traditions to pick a group of leaders for no specific reason, other than to fill the leadership structure established in tribal constitutions imposed on tribal nations by the colonizer decades ago.³⁹ Nanaboozhoo knew the colonizer liked a formalized leadership hierarchy, at least some of the time, so that there would be an entity to sign off on the mining leases or land grabs that the colonizer wanted to push through.⁴⁰ Nanaboozhoo had seen again and again elected tribal officials taking actions designed to ensure their own reelection, often at the expense of the tribal community’s real needs.

Vine’s thinking on tribal leadership in the pre-self-determination days was deeply conflicted. On one hand, Vine noted that most Indigenous nations culturally could not conceive that a tribal leader was to be followed merely because of their status as a leader:

Most tribes had never defined power in authoritarian terms. A man consistently successful at war or hunting was likely to attract a following in direct proportion to his continuing successes. Eventually the men with the greatest followings composed an informal council which made important decisions for the group. Anyone was free to follow or not, depending upon his own best judgment. The people only followed a course of action if they were convinced it was best for them. This was as close as most tribes ever got to a formal government. (p. 205)

The election of tribal citizens to constitutionally powerful, formal leadership positions contradicted traditional governance. But while Vine pointed out this cultural mismatch of tribal constitutional government, which for the most part took the form of a corporate structure, he noted that perhaps modern tribal leadership really had no choice but to adopt a hierarchical leadership structure:

[C]orporate life since the last world war has structured itself along the lines taken a couple of centuries earlier by Indian tribes as they developed their customs and traditions of social existence. Totems have been replaced by trade marks, powwows by conventions, and beads by gray flannels. War songs have been replaced by advertising slogans. As in the tribe, so in the corporation the “chief” reigns supreme. (p. 229)

Vine had noted that federal agencies previously experimented with government-to-government contracting prior to Congress enacting the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975.⁴¹ He acknowledged tribal support of these contracts as the “wave of the future” (which they were) despite their reliance on corporate hierarchy for administration (p. 140).

And here Nanaboozhoo was, sitting alongside their relatives on the Shenanagona tribal council. They wanted to see for themself whether Indigenous culture could survive hierarchical leadership. And they wanted to see how Indigenous culture could permeate governance, subtly erasing the worst abuses and faults of hierarchical leadership.

Most days, Nanaboozhoo loved the work. They loved standing up for the Shenanagona Nation against the companies that wanted to pollute the waters near their reservation.⁴² They loved working with the state governor and attorney general to complete a cooperative agreement ensuring that reservation residents would not have to pay state income tax for reservation-derived income,⁴³ recalling Vine’s dictum about how outsiders believed tribal nations “hoarded wealth” (p. 88). They loved helping to draft the tribal laws needed to implement the tribe’s criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian child abusers,⁴⁴—even deferring to the tribe’s lawyers on key points, relinquishing their previous role as tribal counsel.

Sometimes, though, Nanaboozhoo was disappointed. Tribal children still struggled in school; with low self-esteem; and, like their parents and grandparents, with addiction. Tribal police officers—trained like state, local, and federal officers—enforced the law (sometimes violently) without recognizing the countervailing values of community healing that the mukwa doodem (bear clan) imparted on the tribe since ancient times.⁴⁵ Tribal politics broke their heart worst of all. Relatives demanded more and more resources, preferably in the form of cash, from the tribal government, and colleagues on the council obliged, often at the expense of the tribe’s long-term financial security.

On a plane returning from a frustrating meeting with federal officials, Nanaboozhoo remembered Vine’s cynicism about tribal leadership “raising hell” in D.C., going to a good dinner afterwards, and then flying back home, presumably in triumph (pp. 14–15). In Nanaboozhoo’s experience, tribal elected leaders were forced into dealing with a series of immediacies, taking short-term acts designed to respond to short-term conflicts. Nanaboozhoo reflected that much of their day-to-day was spent listening to complaints from tribal citizens about their neighbors and relatives, complaints that were once referred to the doodemaag (clans) for resolution but now went to the tribal corporate leadership. Successfully resolving these complaints certainly would help Nanaboozhoo with reelection, but they saw how the corporate governance structure insidiously undermined tribal culture. As Vine wrote:

Indian tribes have always had two basic internal strengths, which can also be seen in corporations: customs and clans. Tribes are not simply composed of Indians. They are highly organized as clans, within which variations of tribal traditions and customs govern. While the tribe makes decisions on general affairs, clans handle specific problems. Trivia is thus kept out of tribal affairs by referring it to clan solutions.
Customs rise as clans meet specific problems and solve them. They overflow from the clan into general tribal usage as their capability and validity are recognized. Thus, a custom can spread from a minor clan to the tribe as a whole and prove to be a significant basis for tribal behavior. In the same manner, methods and techniques found useful in one phase of corporate existence can become standard operating procedure for an entire corporation. (pp. 232–33)

Nanaboozhoo couldn’t have said it better. They were ready for something different.

Naanaan

One year, Nanaboozhoo was appointed a tribal judge. The Shenanagona Nation was one of the first tribal nations to constitutionally separate the political and judicial branches of tribal government.⁴⁶ The tribal constitution provided required the judiciary include a mix of law-trained judges and tribal elders.⁴⁷ The law-trained judges would handle the complex commercial litigation and special tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. Non-lawyers and elders could handle other cases, with the assistance of law-trained clerks.

Going into this position, Nanaboozhoo knew that the colonizer had deeply influenced, often through coercion, nearly all of the tribe’s laws and judicial opinions. The tribe derived its constitution from the old boilerplate constitutions adopted in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.⁴⁸ The Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) introduced individual rights (as Congress in1968 understood them) into the mix.⁴⁹ The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and the special tribal jurisdictional provisions of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Acts compelled tribes to favor law-trained judges.⁵⁰ In short, the informal justice proceedings Nanaboozhoo knew of from centuries ago⁵¹ were no more. But that was the price to pay if the tribe wanted to assume jurisdiction over nonmembers and comply with federal principles.

Being a trained lawyer, Nanaboozhoo initially accepted this bargain, but after spending several weeks with tribal elders, they learned it was more complicated. One elder quoted Vine to their face: “Laws passed by Congress had but one goal—the Anglo-Saxonization of the Indian. The antelope had to become a white man” (p. 172). The elders advised Nanaboozhoo that the tribal court was intimidating or suspicious (or both) to most tribal citizens even before the professionalization of the judiciary. For many tribal citizens, the court had become impossible, a “white man’s court.”⁵² Elders wanted to incorporate tribal culture into the law but had no idea how to do so.

Nanaboozhoo remembered something Vine had written expressing deeply conflicted views about tribal laws, recognizing tribal frustration over colonizer laws preemption while nevertheless preferring the development of a tribal common law even if dominated by federal law:

With the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, Indian tribes fell victim to the Bill of Rights. The stage is now set for total erosion of traditional customs by sterile codes devised by the white man. Some tribes are now fighting to get the law amended because the law allows reliance on traditional Indian solutions only to the extent that they do not conflict with state and federal laws.
Although the Bill of Rights is not popular with some tribes, the Pueblos in particular, I do not believe that it should be amended. With the strengthening of tribal courts Indian tribes now have a golden opportunity to create an Indian common law comparable to the early English common law. (p. 238)

Vine worried that tribes’ customary and traditional laws were not detailed enough to adequately resolve modern disputes (p. 221). Nanaboozhoo hoped to prove Vine wrong on that point.

Working with the elders, Nanaboozhoo helped to introduce non-adversarial dispute resolution mechanisms into the tribal court. Vine had their back on this initiative, pointing out that, historically and culturally, tribal nations often opposed punitive correction for lawbreakers, instead favoring restitution:

One of the chief customs in Indian life is the idea of compensation instead of retribution in criminal law. Arbitrary punishment, no matter how apparently suitable to the crime, has had little place in Indian society. These customs have by and large endured and many tribes still feel that if the culprit makes a suitable restitution to his victim no further punishment need be meted out by the tribe. (pp. 237–38)

Nanaboozhoo recalled one of the most famous federal Indian law decisions, Ex parte Crow Dog,⁵³ where the tribe had chosen compensation, rather than coercive, violent punishment, for a murder.⁵⁴ When Congress effectively reversed that decision by enacting the Major Crimes Act,⁵⁵ Vine noted with typical biting wit, “Indians became convinced they were the world’s stupidest people” (p. 9). Nanaboozhoo believed that restorative justice was the future, not coercive punishment. So did the elders.

Nanaboozhoo also dedicated themself to using Anishinaabe philosophical principles to interpret those tribal laws introduced or heavily influenced by the colonizer. Luckily, they did not have to invent the wheel or create a name for everything, like they once had to do when they were one of the very first Anishinaabe; plenty of Anishinaabe scholars had been doing this work for years.⁵⁶

Nanaboozhoo wondered why Vine complacently allowed federal and state law to permeate tribal justice systems. Perhaps Vine thought that tribal culture would permeate the tribal common law decisions interpreting the colonizer’s written laws (p. 238). Nanaboozhoo hoped so. Vine had also said that non-Indigenous American law had turned sharply toward codification, which stunted or eliminated common law development (p. 236). Vine concluded, “We are just passing through the most radical period of law as a confining instrument of social control” (p. 236). Nanaboozhoo thought that statement was the most brilliant statement they had ever read.

Nanaboozhoo eventually grew tired of tribal judging. It was enjoyable and fulfilling. But the job limited their impact to the cases they heard as a judge or the development of restorative justice initiatives. And sooner or later, the tribal government would tire of their efforts to impose accountability on it. One day, they found themself laughing too hard at one of the jokes in Custer, the one about the Indian leader who decided he would rather go to hell than go to heaven where all the missionaries were (p. 152).

Ingodwaaswi

One year, Nanaboozhoo became a law professor. They had freedom to say and write what they wanted. They could be stridently critical or unapologetically praiseful of those doing well in and around Indian country. They could tell stories all night and all day; students had little choice but to placate Nanaboozhoo. Nanaboozhoo was in heaven. It was way better than actual work. It was like they had retired. They felt they were following in Vine’s shoes, who lived, went to law school, and then became an academic.

Nanaboozhoo felt comfortable commenting on pretty much anything in the area of federal Indian law and tribal law, but they couldn’t nail down what subject they would write about. They were too close to the issues. And Vine was too distant. Custer was full of anecdotes, history, and theoretical insight, but it was really dated and . . . well, a bit too metaphysical.⁵⁷ So, Nanaboozhoo turned to Sam Deloria, Vine’s brother. Nanaboozhoo volunteered at the summer program, teaching Indian law to a group of Indigenous students in the summer before they began law school.⁵⁸ On any given day, Sam would sit in the American Indian Law Center’s atrium in Albuquerque and talk Indian law and policy. Sam knew how power worked in legal education,⁵⁹ sure, but he also knew how power worked in D.C. and in tribal councils. He advised against attacking state and federal judges hostile to tribal interests as mere racists. He had ideas on how to persuade one’s adversaries and even had ideas on how to not think of one’s adversaries as adversaries. He said the best lawyers knew their adversaries as much as they knew their friends. And Sam was funny. Nanaboozhoo took copious notes on those conversations with Sam. Two months with Sam helped them focus their knowledge into useful scholarly work. Nanaboozhoo wanted to be like Sam and elevate useful pragmatic scholarship,⁶⁰ not like the friendly anthropologists that Vine condemned: “Abstract theories create abstract action” (p. 86).

Nanaboozhoo’s first law review article was accepted for publication. They thought they knew everything, so the draft article was lightly sourced and footnoted. During the editing process, the second-and third-year law student editors demanded that every single sentence be footnoted. Nanaboozhoo responded with one of Vine’s maxims: “I do not place much faith in well-footnoted proposals” (p. 89). The editors were unimpressed, so Nanaboozhoo had to go look up a YouTube video on how to use the footnote function in the word processor. They chuckled as they worked. Perhaps the greatest trick perpetrated upon the trickster was the footnote.

Niizhwaaswi

In Nanaboozhoo’s last year, they died. They walked on the ghost road, then spent a night talking to the old Anishinaabe innini that everyone called Mishomis who resided next to the bridge over the river of the dead. The next day, Nanaboozhoo crossed the bridge and left Anishinaabewaki forever. When they arrived in the village of the dead, no one was there; so, they built a small lodge to await the relatives. They started a fire and stared into it for what seemed like hours. When the dead Anishinaabeg came back from wherever they were, Nanaboozhoo stepped outside to visit with them. They sat around the fire, told stories about their living days, about their relatives, about the old ways. Nanaboozhoo loved it when they retold the trickster stories, the creation stories, the aadizookaan. Nanaboozhoo liked to be remembered—to be the center of attention—and to be reminded of those days before the colonizer arrived, before the apocalypse. No one said anything about the Supreme Court or which American political party was in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Indian Health Service. These Indians were at peace.

One day, strangers came to the village of the dead. They wore clothes that Nanaboozhoo recognized as Haudenosaunee. They came to visit and share stories, maybe try some Anishinaabe-style frybread. When you’re dead, frybread is good for your health. They told a story that Nanaboozhoo remembered from Custer, the story of the eventual return of Indigenous cultures and lands, one that Vine told, too:

There is great similarity between Hopi prophecy and Iroquois [Haudenosaunuee] prophecy regarding the end of the white man and the restoration of the red man to dominance on this continent. Many people, especially whites, laugh when they hear the Hopi prophecy, feeling that they are so powerful that nothing can overcome them. (p. 114)

These Indians told the story as if some version of this prophecy had already happened, that the world had gone full circle. Nanaboozhoo realized that for these dead Indians, it really had already happened. Time moved forward and backward there. The fates of Indigenous peoples were always waxing and waning, always would be, until the heat death of the universe. Nanaboozhoo knew this because they remembered falling into the final, supermassive black hole billions of years ago, only to be reborn again after the Big Bang. They thought the next time that happened, they would imagine into existence a chaise lounge upon which to relax while they fell into the final black hole.

After all this reflection, Nanaboozhoo remembered that they were immortal. They could return to Anishinaabewaki anytime they wanted. They also knew that tribal nations were timeless entities. But people were not. They needed help and guidance, inspiration. Nanaboozhoo remembered an anecdote from Custer, the one where Vine explained how tribal lawyers helped to cancel a television show about Custer in 1967 (p. 24). How did a small group of powerless Indians and their advisors fight the powerful American Broadcasting Company and win? They located “the weak points where leverage and power can be combined to provide a means of pivoting the power structure that confronts [tribal interests]” (p. 255).

Nanaboozhoo loved television. It had gotten so much better since Vine published Custer. He was still referencing the Lone Ranger and Tonto (Nanaboozhoo hadn’t watched the more recent Johnny Depp vehicle, knowing it would never be as good as the 1491s sketch⁶¹ commenting on Johnny Depp’s “adoption” into Comanche tribal citizenship). Dead Indians loved watching the old 1491s videos on YouTube and all the Marvel and Star Wars films and shows written by and starring Indigenous people, laughing and laughing and laughing.

Nanaboozhoo said baamaapii to the relatives and headed back toward the land of the living. They had a plan. They had hope. As Vine said, “It would have been fairly simple for the federal government to have provided a special legal status whereby Indian rights would have vested while keeping their original sovereignty and entitlements of self-government” (p. 49). Nanaboozhoo knew that, though it might be simple for tribal nations and Indigenous peoples to prevail, even to save the world, it would not be easy. Still, they wanted to be there to help make it happen. But Nanaboozhoo was still Nanaboozhoo—really, they wanted to be at the celebration party. It was going to be greatest 49 of all time.⁶²

* Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law and Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan. Thanks to Sam Erman and Wenona Singel.